I'm still a little skeptical family connections will play a large-ish (or at least larger) role in the next saga, but if Nomura decided to go there with Sora, films like TLM, TLK, Coco, Mulan, TP&TF, Frozen, Lilo & Stitch, Aladdin and the King of Thieves all immediately come to mind as films focused on familial bonds. So does Treasure Planet (well, at least it focuses to a degree on Jim's broken bond with a father who left his family and how Silver fills that void), although sometimes I wonder if that film actually has a chance of ever appearing in KH even though I would love it to. Didn't it almost appear in 3D? In a way, I'm glad it didn't appear then because I want Jim Hawkins to be a party member for sure. There are some others that could be related to the family theme in one way or another, ofc (Bambi taking on his father's role as prince of the forest, TJB with Mowgli having to leave his friends to return to his own kind, etc.). It's a shame that Tarzan can never appear in KH again. :/
I think at most it is going to be a larger than present role. With so many Disney movies touching that theme rather nicely, or in Lilo and Nani's case beautifully, them shining a bit more of a spot light on it would be cool.
I think Treasure Planet could also be cool for that seeing, it shows a familial bond between to unrelated people, kind of like how I think TAVE should theoretically be looked at, but that might just be my interpretation of that Trio's relationship with their Master.
As for TLM, I agree that it would have to be set in the prologue of TLM2 (if they use the sequel at all), just for the fact it hasn't been 10-15 years for Melody to grow up. I don't really like TLM2, so I love your idea of a plot involving Ariel missing her family and adjusting to life on land***. Although it wouldn't bother me if Melody appeared as a baby in a crib only, lol. I'd love if there was a 50/50 water:land world for it like they were able to pull off successfully with The Caribbean in KH3.
EDIT:***I just imagined something Cinderella-esque with SDG being as small as Sebastian and trying not to die in the kitchen for one segment of the world, ha.
I think it being a 50/50 land and sea world could be awesome, but would only be doable before Ariel becomes a mother, seeing the wall around her castle was only built after they took Melody to meet her grandfather. This would also allow Sqaure and Disney to avoid using stuff from the sequel, which according to someone else here is something they're trying to avoid for some reason.
While that is a humorous idea, I'd question the mechanics of how they got so small. I still wander why Ven entered the Enchanted domain and became mouse sized.
No offense intended, but I don't think it's a good idea to do a Wall-E world
Pixar doesn’t want KH shoehorning itself into the plots of the original films. This would be especially true for Wall-E since it is one of their most critically acclaimed films. Wall-E, however, doesn’t really have anywhere to go if they follow a sequel approach because the humans are just recolonizing the Earth. They could have Wall-E and EVe traveling together and encounter SDG in an original world
While I love Wall-E, I don't think it's a good idea to do a storyline (be it an original one and especially a retelling of the movie), because the ending because the humans are just recolonizing the Earth.
I think the only way I could see characters from Wall-E (Wall-E, EVE) appear in the KH series without having SDG go to the film's world and do an original storyline is perhaps they can be characters residing in an original world like how Little Chef (Remy) is in Twilight Town in Scrooge McDuck's Bistrot Restaurant in KH3. But then again it's going to be VERY difficult on how they would implement these characters when compared to Remy as he was brought to Twilght Town from his original homeworld by Scrooge so that he can continue expanding his culinary Horizons and be Scrooge's Chef at his Bistrot.
I actually also don't want a Wall-E world, seeing like you mentioned I don't see how they'd want to fit Sora and co. into the storyline an Original story doesn't work because either you'd lose the setting that's interesting or the characters we care about. At most I think Wall-E or rather EVE should be a summon, or security droid Ansem the Wise builds based off of bluepints he found while on his revenge quest.
Again I'm not a Pixar fan, so for me personally the less Pixar included the better, but that's just me.
What that game does show is that it's actually very simple to create a storyline for anything if you're willing to put thought into it. None of the worlds that have appeared in this series are truly off-limits from appearing again. Especially since the interest of including / pimping popular films trumps all other things.
Yeah I think that's a good point. Pretty much all of the worlds still have interesting things you can do with them. I mean Tangled's and Aladdin's cartoons show kind of proved there was still a lot you could get out of those setting and characters.
I feel the only limiting factor here is, what Disney will allow and how creative Nomura and his team can be.